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Talk:Episode 5: Polarized/@comment-72.199.52.9-20160217201222
***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** I don't think any game has moved me as much as this game, and I can't stop talking about it, so I'll offer my $0.02 worth. I think we all desire a complete closure on stories, but there are always practical reasons for the story teller not to resolve every detail. Sometimes it has to do with time and pace of the story. Other times it has to do with budget of the producer. And in the end, if a story resolves completely to satisfy all possible questions, we would still be unsatisified. The resolution of the story would fizzle out rather than drop a bomb on you. The developers of LiS sprinkled enough clues to satisfy me, and here are my thoughts on the various unanswered questions. Time Travel Powers Regarding Max's powers, I think that her powers stem from a convergence of the Native American spirits, the bad energy of the town of Arcadia Bay (drugs, abductions, death, etc...), and Max and Chloe's bond of friendship. It was a psychic/metaphysical "perfect storm", if you will. Max is merely the nexus point of all that energy. Max's spirit animal-guide, the doe, is another manifestation of this energy -- maybe it's connected to the land or the Native spirits or whatever. Whether or not Max continues to have her powers, really depends on how we believe the "energy" resolved. Both endings suggest a "resolution" of all that "energy" (except maybe for the Native Americal spirits, but who's to say they're not satisified by the removal of all the desecrators of their native lands?). My gut feeling is that Max is left powerless in either ending. I believe that Max's powers are confined to time rewind and time-travel into photographs. The "vision" appears to be something else, because she only gets this one vision, as opposed to visions of possible other disasterous future outcomes. I also don't believe that she was actually transported into that future, because it is merely a potential future. Perhaps, once again, this is her spirit guide trying to lead her. The doe makes an appearance in at last one such vision that I could recall. If this convergence of energy is "how" Max got her powers, then the reason "why" Max got these powers is purely coincidental. Her friendship with Chloe, the confrontation between Nathan and Chloe, Max's always-try-to-help personality makes this all converge on her. Did this power come with a purpose or a responsibility? That presumes that there was some single source of that power with a "divine mandate" or some such thing. I don't recall ever seeing any evidence of that. The doe was the closest thing to a guiding force, and the doe didn't actually do much guiding. The Storm About the storm itself, the game would lead us to believe that Max's time travels "created" the storm, but most of us agree that answer leaves far too many loose ends. Time travel is a messy business, and concepts such as "causality" become fuzzy. The storm is clearly tied to Chloe's life, or perhaps Max's desire for Chloe or some combination thereof. It can be thought of as the manifestation of the power/energy of one person's life and two people's love (regardless of whether you see it as sexual desire or affection of best friends). I'm not going to get into the trade-off of "energy" of Chloe's life and all the lives that must have been lost when the storm hits Arcadia Bay. They are unfortunate collateral damage, but the ending is all about life not giving us perfect choices and perfect choices. The storm does not come specifically if Max allows Chloe to die. We are lead to believe that by not using her powers, the storm was not created, but I remind you of the messiness of time-travel paradoxes. In order to get to the point where Max is presented this choice, she has already extensively manipulated time. Red Herrings Samuel and David (and Nathan, to the degree that he doesn't turn out to be the central villain) are all red herrings of sorts. Their personalities and clues found in their spaces are intended to make us suspicious of them: David's conspiratorial nature and all the creepy surveillance found in his garage. Samuel's general creepiness and the girly mags and silk scarf found in his storage room. And basically all of Nathan's stuff and his overall psychotic cockiness. How does any of these people fit into Max's powers or the impending storm? Perhaps not at all. Or maybe they just further contribute to the "energy" that creates Max's power and the storm. Samuel may just be a lonely creepy janitor looking at girly mags in his storage room, but that could be more fuel for energy/storm/power. Nathan was a victim, so far as he was manipulated by Jefferson, which is sad and makes Nathan a bit tragic, but he was responsible for Rachel's death, which still makes him guilty. The Nightmare I have no explanation for the bulk of the last episode. Was it the fragments of all her alternate realities? Was it all just in her head when she blacked out? Don't know. Don't care. This was my least favorite part of the game, and so it was the part of the story I spent the least amount of time mulling over. Nothing that Max does in the nightmare makes difference or has any consequences, and that's ultimately why it doesn't matter. I felt it was like just "filler material" added to make this episode long enough. Because this sequence didn't matter, it made it much easier for me to swallow the idea that the nightmare sequence was all just in Max's head. The one thing I liked about the nightmare sequence was confronting and being confronted by the alternate Max. Whether or not she is actually one of the Maxes cast off in some alternate reality doesn't really matter, but she accuses Max (and by proxy me, the player) that she's not all that altruistic, but rewinds time because she's selfish. Rewinding time to tell people things they want to her and fixing things so that people will like me more. That was so very true and so very poignant. In the end, I totally echo Chloe's many sentiments about the town of Arcadia Bay -- how she wished a nuke would fall on Arcadia Bay and glass the entire town. The bad there out weighed the good there by so much that helped me to choose Chloe over the town. I mentioned in the forum my feelings and how I came to choose Chloe over Arcadia Bay. The fact is that either the storm wipes out the town and the energy of the storm is then expended, or the Max's heart is broken because Chloe dies and she will never experience all the intimacy the two of them shared throughout the story and Nathan and Mr. Jefferson go to jail and the energy is diffused. The way the endings resolve in turn help me to resolve all the messy time-travel-alternate-timeline paradoxes. The loose ends simply fray into nonexistence, and the "main" timeline is the one persists. The important thing to remember about time, only the present exists. The past is already gone and the future does not yet exist.